Urban Beehive The reddot award winning Urban Beehive from Philips Design shows us that ant farms are obsolete and we should be gunning our attention on bees.

The Urb is in line with the concept and makes beekeeping a ‘less daunting and more attractive process for novices.’ The biggest advantage is that you don’t need to adorn the protective garb when you handle the bin. You can observe the colony and use the technology implements to extract the honey easily.
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Istanbul: City of Seeds. It was generous of the The Building Information Centre (YEM) and 34Solo to host an xskool event in their city last week.

Our starting premise, after all, was that Turkey’s 30 year long construction boom is losing momentum. True, the sound of jackhammers was pervasive in Istanbul during our visit – but the cold winds of the global crisis are making themselves felt. An estimated 600,000 dwellings stand unsold in the city and, in January, a first attempt to raise private funding for a third bridge across the Bosphorous failed.
How Food Shapes Our Lives. News. Agriculture Urbaine. Maison. Projets Greenroofs.com - Changi General Hospital.

The Changi General Hospital website states, "The hospital has made caring for the environment a priority, because the long-term benefits and savings help both people and the surroundings we live in.

Patients are often worried and frightened when they come to a hospital. By beautifying the hospital with lots of plants and trees, we wish to create a more serene and restful environment for patients. Similarly, planting hydroponics on the rooftops provides food for the hospital, but also absorbs the heat from the roof, cooling the wards facing it. At the hospital, we also faced huge utility bills. The hospital started to look into ways of reducing energy and water consumption to eliminate wastage. Our greening culture that started in the early 1990s at Toa Payoh Hospital has flourished and spread throughout the Hospital with the Green Fingers Club leading the way.
Générer des rendements plus élevés. VertiCrop™ provides a proven, cost effective alternative to typical crop production.

Designed to grow in any climate and with an exceptionally small footprint in urban environments, VertiCrop™ uses only a fraction of the resources needed for field agriculture, while generating substantially higher yields. Growing with VertiCrop™ Yields are approximately 20 times higher than the normal production volume of field crops VertiCrop™ requires only 8% of the normal water consumption used to irrigate field crops Works on non-arable lands and close to major markets or urban centers Does not require the use of harmful herbicides or pesticides Able to grow over 50 varieties of leafy green vegetables Significantly reduces transportation distance, thereby reducing cost and carbon foot print Provides higher quality produce with greater nutritional value and a longer shelf life High levels of food security due to the enclosed growing process Scalable from small to very large food production operation. New Ark, Mega-Agropolis - Société d'architecture de travail.

Imagining an Elastic City. Planters and urban gardening tools at Kennedy Greenway in central Boston, the site of the Occupy Boston encampment.

Last spring, after attending a panel about urbanism in Mumbai, I wrote a blog post about what I called the "entropic city" — one that is constantly changing and re-imagining itself. “Entropy,” I argued, “is a cultural and an economic necessity. Restricting and channeling change imposes a dominant idea of what change should be, and what existing conditions are undesirable. But it also stifles innovation and creates monocultural economic environments that are vulnerable to dramatic changes. And, let's be honest, it's a lot less fun.”
Multifonctionnalité de l’agriculture urbaine à Montréal : étude des discours au sein du programme des jardins communautaires.

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Presentation IASA in Canada. Atelier d'architecture autogérée. Atelier d'architecture autogérée (aaa - Studio for Self-managed Architecture) is a practice based in Paris co-founded by architects, Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu in 2001. aaa acts as a platform for collaborative research and action on the city and much of their work is carried out with other specialists, artists, researchers and institutional partners such as universities, arts organisations and NGOs, as well as the eventual users of their spaces.

Whilst the founding members of aaa remain, the practice operates as a collaborative network that forms around each project. aaa's projects are experiments in the temporary reuse of leftover urban space through the setting up of an enabling infrastructure that is slowly taken over by local residents and transformed into self-managed spaces.
ARCH'IT architetture / BRANZI, BARTOLINI, LANI. Eindhoven, un modello di urbanizzazione debole. IL SISTEMA OGGETTUALE.

Urban Farming. The practice of cultivating food and raising animals in an urban environment is referred to variously as urban farming or urban agriculture. Whilst small-scale and localised food production has a long history, including individual allotments which have been popular in Europe since the late C18, it is the integration of such farming practices within the economic and ecological system of towns and cities that is a newer development.

This means that urban resources such as compost from food waste and waste water from urban drainage is made use of, whilst urban problems such as the pressure on land and development also have to be negotiated. The recent of example of Cuba has proven the effectiveness of urban agriculture, where it played a critical role in ensuring food security after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.
RUAF - Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security. Eat The Suburbs!
Green roof « Green Infrastructure Digest. Server by Alastair Parvin « arkinet. Some days ago we published the first of a serie of projects from the the President’s Medals for Students Projects organized by theRoyal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The winning entries will be published on December 2, so in the meanwhile, we continue publishing some of the students projects that are participating.

This time the project is called SERVER and it was presented by Alastair Parvin from The University of Sheffield Sheffield UK. We have talked before about food problems in cities and the different solutions that can be developed, such as vertical farming or urban farming. This time Parvin’s proposal has more similities to MVRDV’s Pig City than with skyfarming and the project speculates upon whether we can redefine what is actually meant by the term ‘local’.

C'est notamment le cas d'Amir Yousefi avec son projet "Carnivore Factory".
Re:farm the city. I will share here a low cost solution for the recycling of organic waste, appropriate for apartments and urban housing that do not have a piece of land or an outdoor area. This construction is inspired by the Cadico earthworms nice project. The photos are from the composter I made here at home : ) It’s called a Vermi composter because we use worms in the process, uhuuuuu big thanks to the worms, they deserve! To make this kind of composter, it is important to use stackable supports to separate the different stages of composting. In this case, I used 3 buckets of margarine 15L reused.
École d'agriculture urbaine - du 15 au 19 août 2011. Urban Leaves. New York Bounty. Gestion du développement durable : Exploration internationale (ESG 600-L et 600-M) » Archives du blogue » L’agriculture en milieu urbain, un système durable ?